Want to make an interesting, unusual and totally dekadent drink this Halloween? Make Butterbeer! But the real stuff, not the fake and horrible drink you get in the Warner Bros. amusement parks. Our recipe is inspired by a traditional English Butter or Ale Recipe, something that was quite common back in the good old days. It's such a fantastic and authentic drink, and it does remind you of being in Hogwarts, but in a good way!
Besides making recipe videos we also want to make short videos about common problems in the kitchen. Obviously one of the main reasons why we make our videos is to share our experiences and to help fellow foodies and passionate cooks.
This video features the common problem of looking after shop-bought basil plants properly. They're available everywhere and are great for garnishing dishes, they're not always in good shape but if you get a decent plant you should be able to keep it for 1-2 months. Funny enough, so many people we know always tell us that their plants only last for a few days or a week, and also the description and use-by date on the plants often say that they only last for a couple of weeks. But our experience with shop-bought basil plants has always been rather different, sometimes you can get the odd bug or virus on a plant and they won't keep long, but otherwise we find that our plants last for a really long time.
Our video will guide you through our tips of how to keep your plants happy and productive and hopefully you will never again feel the disappointment of a dwindling rotting basil plant in your kitchen!
We love making our YouTube videos to document and share our experiences, especially food related experiences :) As we're travelling quite a bit this year we want to film our travels a bit and especially our cool foodie moments abroad. It's all not that serious, it's just simple fun and we want to show that.
This time we went to London and we really love going to London for food. We really believe that London is one of the food capitals of the world, the amount of fantastic restaurants and excellent food is just staggering. There's so much to discover everywhere, from chic restaurants to alternative health food places, to great chocolate and fantastic gastro pubs.
We hope you enjoy our banter! Thanks for watching and let us know what your favourite places are in London?!
This here's a cool little recipe, inspired by Japanese Hot Cakes, which are basically fluffy pancakes. Almost all hot cake recipes use a 'hot cake mix' which people simply mix with milk and an egg and then cook in a deep pan. Of course not everybody can get hold of a 'hot cake mix', so we wanted to make a recipe from scratch. Our recipe is pretty much a basic pancake recipe, but what we do to get them really fluffy is to beat the egg whites until they're really fluffy and then fold them gently into the batter. This makes the pancakes really fluffy, and when you use a deep pan and you cook them gently with a lid you can get really good fluffy pancakes with a fantastic flavour. They taste a lot more natural than most fluffy pancakes because they don't have that strong baking soda flavour. They're very easy to make and incredibly satisfying so please try our recipe :)
I've really been enjoying making this series of gardening/food programmes. It's great to see how the whole garden is coming along over the months and we're trying so many new things this year that it's great to record our experiences and to share them with our audience. Of course the latest episode was a week late, but the weather at the end of March here was just awful, snow blizzards for days, something quite unusual for Northern Ireland! It didn't really damage the garden much, it just delayed everything. But growing and producing your food is like that, it's quite unpredictable, that's why it's always good to have a few options when growing your own.
This month's episode gives an update on our seedling situation. The seedlings from January were quite slow and they didn't germinate that well, however we did manage to get around 60 pea plants, a lot of spring onions, spinach, lettuce and lamb's lettuce from that sowing. The indoor february sowing was more succesful, we got another load of healthy peas, which we put into the polytunnel at the community garden. Then there's more spinach, more lettuce, spring onions, turnips, broccoli raab and kailaan that has been planted, and beetroot, celery, cauliflower and calabrese broccoli still have to go into the ground. So all in all not too bad!
Then we also looked at Asparagus. I really love fresh asparagus, and the fresh stuff is so different to most asparagus you can buy. It's incredibly sweet and you can easily eat it raw, whereas the shop-bought stuff is nice, but it mostly only has that strong asparagus flavour. However, it will take two more years for us until we can eat our planted asparagus! That might seem like a long wait and a waste of a good raised bed, but we're also growing other crops alongside our asparagus, such as lettuce, peas, spring onions, bush beans, anything shallow rooting basically that won't disturb the root system of the asparagus. Now asparagus can be quite a tricky crop to get right, and we've tried to produce the perfect conditions as described in the video. Also, asparagus really doesn't like weeds, that's why weed-free raised beds are particularly suited to this crop. And during high summer it's alsways good to put a layer of grass cuttings or straw over the asparagus so that it keeps dry, later in the year you can then mulch with compost or manure to provide your plants with additional nutrients.
At this time of the year it's quite good to look at compost and mulching. Compost is an invaluable resource to the gardener, it does so much for the soil and your plants and you can make it for free! Compost is very easy to make and as long as you use raw biodegradable material such as fruit and veg peelings, paper, grass cuttings etc you will create compost. But a lot of people have a compost bin without actually having in mind to create compost! It's just another bin to them! However, getting it right makes all the difference with compost, it will be less stinky, sticky and wet. I try to put in half and half of 'greens' and 'browns', greens meaning veg peelings, kitchen and gardening waste, and browns meaning carbon materials such as cardboard, paper, tree leaves, wood shavings, ash etc. Most people make the mistake of only using 'greens', which makes compost very wet and stinky and attracts loads of flies! If you use half and half of greens and browns and mix these from time to time you will get a perfect mixture, moist and crumbly compost. It's almost like cooking! I tend to leave my compost for six months after I've finished feeding it, which generally makes very good mulching compost. I mostly use my homemade compost for mulching, but if you would like yours to be finer either sieve it or leave it to ferment longer.
I tend to have compost ready twice a year when I need it for mulching, in early spring and autumn. Mulching is very important for fruit bushes and trees, it will really make a difference in your crop production. It suppresses weeds, it improves the soil by adding organic matter and nutrients and it keeps your soil most. So many things can be used for mulching, compost, manure, sea weed, grass cuttings, ash, wood shavings, or a mixture of all these. I tend to use whatever I've got lying around! And of course whatever each plant species prefers. So do give mulching a try, it's really very straightforward and inexpensive but it makes such a difference.
Finally our epsiode looks at a field to fork recipe, by using our fresh lamb's lettuce, also known as corn salad, to make a scrumptious salad bar recipe. We love salads with lots of different ingredients, they're not at all like the boring stuff you get in most restaurants. Salads can have real character by chosing some fantastic ingredients. We like a mixture of grains like couscous, lentils, quinoa or pearl barley to give body and provide that delicious carb-comfort; we then like to add some toasted nuts or seeds, which add great texture and bold flavours. Then we really like adding different type of veg, sometimes roasted, sometimes raw, depending on what's seasonal. And finally we like adding something creamy and salty, maybe a bit of goat's cheese or sheep's cheese, or a nice creamy dressing. We like a nice mayo dressing, which basically consists of homemade mayo with the zest and juice of half a lemon, half a clove of crushed garlic and some fresh herbs (we used ground rosemary). Absoluetly delicious! When you try this salad you'll soon forget the boring iceberg alternative!
As always, thanks for watching and we hope our advice is helpful :)
Thanks to all our subscribers and viewers for your support! We are so excited that we've reached 500 subscribers 100.000 video views, we know it's not that much compared to some YouTube people but it really means a lot to us. We remember the days whenever we got a new subscriber every two weeks or so, and now it's up to 50 a week. It can obviously change really quickly on YouTube, so we are enjoying the fact that more people are watching our videos and are trying our recipes. The feedback is also really great, we are so happy that all of your comments are really nice and that the recipes really work for you, that's our main goal after all!
And we also love the fact that so many of you are from far away countries, where we have never been to and quite honestly didn't even know that YouTube existed there. Shows how much we know about the rest of the world...but we truly love this international aspect of YouTube, to be in touch with so many different cultures and people that speak different languages is something that is close to our hearts because we ourselves are from an international background. So please spread the word and we hope that our cooking videos can help you experience the amazing world of homemade food :)
We also hope you enjoy our St Patrick's Day footage! A big thank you to Claude, Marie and Ryan who came along and supported us during the parade, we couldn't have done it without you guys! It was really so much fun, as you can probably tell from all the nonsense on camera, and we will never forget that experience!
This episode was so much fun to make! Ciabatta is such an amazing bread and this particular version with olives, pine nuts and semolina, really reminds us of Italy and the great holidays we had there. Hence also our Italian intro, and our bad attempts at Italian gestures and body language! It was also great to have our friend Claude over for a visit and to do some filming with him, and to hear his very discerning taste critique. But in the end, what made this episode so much fun was the bread itself!
Ciabatta is a really easy bread to make as long as you remember a few steps. Your dough has to rise a lot longer to create those air bubbles. You also don't want to properly deflate your dough as you would with other breads. Ciabatta dough is also a lot wetter than most breads, and wet doughs usually tend to make a lighter bread with more air holes and they also tend to have a better crust. Although it's obviously great to have those nice air bubbles for looks and texture, too many recipes tend to focus on that aspect of Ciabatta only, whereas we think it is vital not to forget flavour! That is what makes this recipe different, because the ingredients we use are just great and work so well with each other and just give loads of flavour to the bread, making it a feast of classic Italian ingredients!
Pretty much all of the ingredients used in this recipe have something to do with Italy. White Spelt flour is not the most obvious one, especially when it's not grown in Italy, but Spelt was actually one of the most important grain crops in the Roman empire. Also, the bread that the Romans made with spelt flour was very similar to a Ciabatta, quite flat and either round or oval shaped. I truly love Spelt flour for breadmaking, it makes the lightest and stretchiest dough, even when using wholemeal flour. And the taste is also outstanding. So if you can, get some Spelt flour for this recipe. In the UK and Ireland it's available in a few supermarkets, but you can also find it in many health food and organic food stores. Otherwise just use 'strong' white bread flour.
Then we have semolina which is a classic Italian ingredient for baking and pasta. Semolina juts gives the bread a rustic texture and flavour, making it taste proper Italian. We didn't do this in the video, but often we also coat our Ciabatta in semolina before baking and it gives the bread an even more rustic flavour and texture.
The combination of olives and pine nuts works so well in bread, and many other foods! In Liguria so many dishes are made with pine nuts and olives, which are two main crops of the region. And this version of Ciabatta really reminds us of our holidays on the Ligurian coast. Also, using good quality extra virgin olive oil adds to that Ligurian feel and again just makes such a difference flavour-wise.
The bread itself is very simple to make, it's an almost no-knead, no-shape bread, it requires very little work especially if you're using a food mixer. If you're kneading by hand we suggest you use a fork for the initial mixing, and then a spatula to fold the dough as shown in the video. And use lots of oil, that makes it less sticky!
And do try this bread as suggested in the video, by rubbing a clove of garlic on the bread and eating it with a selection of nice cheeses and Italian antipasti. Simply delicious! And it's such a good example of how bread can be the main star of a meal. Obviously other savoury foods such a prosciutto, salamis and even patés and terrines are great with this bread. If you're having an Italian dinner party this bread is a must for a starter, but it's also great for those midweek meals when you don't want to cook much but simply eat some bread and something nice on the side. That's what we like :)
In our new program we are giving tips and advice on how to grow your own fruit and veg at home by showing you what we are doing in our garden. Timing is quite important in gardening and we hope that our epsiodes give you a feel for when you need to sow, plant and harvest in your garden. Our episodes are especially relevant to people who live in the UK and Ireland, because we live in Northern Ireland and the climate here is quite cool and not always that easy for gardening.
The February episode looks at indoor sowings, either because it's still too cold outside or because you want to give your plants an early start. Also, some crops like tomatoes, peppers and aubergines really need to be sown indoors, especially in cooler climates. February and March are great times to sow these crops and keeping them indoors until May ensures that you will have a healthy and early crop.
Preparing your ground is also important and February is a great time for this. The soil is warming up but everything's still slow, so digging a bit of compost or manure into your growing soil is perfect at this time of the year and guarantees a fertile soil for the following season.
Then we're also looking at strawberries and garlic. Normally we would have liked to plant them earlier, but planting them now is still very good and should give us a good enough crop. Strawberries and garlic are a great example of companion planting too, the garlic repels aphids and other pests and apparently gives the strawberries a better taste. We'll have to see! And it saves lots of space and both plants like the same soil conditions, deep and light fertile soil. We urge you to try it!
And finally we are showing you how to make a kiwi compte using unripened local kiwis from the walled garden in Helen's Bay. In the UK and Ireland it's really best to grow kiwis undercover, so in a polytunnel or greenhouse. The plants will be fine outside but the kiwis won't ripen properly, and taking them inside to ripen doesn't make them as sweet as their shop-bought cousins. So the answer is to cook them with sugar, and a compote is great for this. It keeps the kiwis tangy flavour but sweetens the fruit, it's absolutely delicious! And it makes for a great pie filling! But it works well with anything, scones, pancakes, yoghurt, whatever! You really need to try this recipe!
Love is in the air, or rather chocolate is! And lots of it! Whether you're single or in a relationship it doesn't matter, as long as you like chocolate! This year we have two great chocolate recipes for you that are not only good for Valentine's Day but throughout the year as they lend themselves well to seasonal ingredients and adaptations.
Our first recipe is Chocolate Truffles with chilli and orange. They are absolutely delicious, rich and creamy and incredibly intense with the orange and chilli. Making chocolate truffles from scratch ensures that you get exactly the flavour that you like: you can choose the quality and intensity of the chocolate, you can add more or less salt, some extra sugar if need be and additional flavourings which make these chocolate truffles unique. They're very easy to make and take no time at all, so please watch our recipe and have a go yourself!
Our second recipe has proved exceptionally popular with guests. Everybody loves chocolate brownies, but what makes ours so special is the twist of adding beetroot and blackcurrant. Adding special ingredients like these to classic recipes surprises people and their tastebuds. It's that 'wow' factor because it is unexpected and simply delicious. Beetroot and blackcurrant are just our suggestions but you could also add carrot, banana, rasperries, blueberries, orange zest, lemon zest...the culinary possiblities are endless. You have to think of chocolate as a vehicle for flavour, it holds and even intensifies flavours really well and makes for great flavour combinations. Of course you could also just make plain chocolate brownies, just increase the amount of chocolate to 300g and leave out the beetroot and blackcurrant. But we really urge you to try our recipe. Not a single person so far has not loved these brownies. They are that good!
Chocolate is just an amazing ingredient and by itself quite healthy, and just delicious and addictive! We hope that you have a great day of making and baking this Valentine's Day! Thanks for watching!
We're really excited about our latest project. A-C and I are keen gardeners, but really only when it comes to edible plants :) We do love beautiful gardens and really believe that edible gardens, i.e. gardens where most plants produce something edible, are not only delicious but also beautiful. Indeed veg and fruit plants come in all shapes and sizes, and colours. The colours are just amazing and the flowers and smells you get from many plants are just divine. But of course growing fruit and veg at home isn't only about beauty; it's also about productivity. You would be surprised how much food can be grown in a bit of soil. Apart from the quantity, the quality and diversity you get from growing your own is astounding.
Honestly, once you've got the bug and experienced some true growing successes and what real food tastes like you're never going back. Fresh sun-ripened strawberries off the plant, still warm from the sun, are so incredibly different to anything you can buy, except if you're at a pick-your-own farm on a nice sunny day. The experience of the freshness and the quality and the sheer delight of flavour and aromas is simply so different because you can get hold of something that simply isn't available in the shops. It only makes sense for supermarkets and most shops to stock a limited variety of fruit and veg, so you as a grower have the chance to discover new types of fruit and veg varieties that you've never tasted before. Even when you take different varieties of the same plant makes a huge difference. This year I grew a quick-growing variety of Italian bulbed fennel. and wow, was that stuff good, so refreshing and juicy and that amazing flavour of anis seed. I've never grown such good fennel before.
I know I'm rambling a bit here, but then again that shows how fascinating it is, even after years now of growing, I still get so excited about this stuff. If you're really into food, then I believe growing your own and really experimenting with what you're growing is the next level. You learn to appreciate fruit and veg for the incredible diversity of flavours and tastes that they produce, and also how they make you feel. Even though I'm somebody who tries to steer away from the typical mantra of 'eat healthy, be healthy', I really do find that eating your own homegrown food makes you feel a lot better. And if that's just because it makes you happy and proud because you've achieved something like growing deliciously sweet peas, well then that's great.
There really are so many reasons for growing your own, especially for foodies, and in our new program we'll touch upon those reasons and show you what we are growing at home and at the community garden in Helen's Bay. Each month we'll be showing you what we're doing in the garden, what projects there are, what we're sowing and harvesting and cooking as well. Hopefully our videos will either give you the inspiration and knowledge you need to start growing your own or if you already grow fruit and veg we hope that you may pick up some helpful hints and ideas :)
A-C and I have recently discovered juicing; of course we knew about it before and we have tried those juices that you get in juice bars and healthy places. But nowhere does homemade juice taste so good as when freshly made with quality ingredients and with your own juicer at home. It's unbelievable, especially in the morning before you have your breakfast. It gives you such an incredible boost, it's like the non-alcoholic version of getting tipsy. And I'm not just saying this because I am one of those people advocating healthy eating. Of course I know what a difference it makes to me to eat healthy foods and lots of fruit and veg, but the experience of your own homemade juice is quite different alltogether. It's that good. The only experience that comes close is when you have your own homegrown fruit, especially berries, and you pick them off the plant on a sunny day and you get so many vitamins and antioxidants into your body you literally feel your face is glowing. Yup, fruit can do that.
Our favourite juice mix normally consists of 1-2 carrots, 1-2 beetroot, and then whatever acidic fruit we have, like apples or oranges. Using the beetroot and the carrots gives the juice a real earthy flavour, but in a good way. It makes it very sweet and has an amazing depth to it. The beetroot especially is essential for that boost you're looking for. If we would only use fruit, especially acidic fruit, there just wouldn't be that balance of sweet and sour and it would lack that creaminess that comes from the veg.
Once you've got that balance in mind, you can really go crazy and just experiment with whatever you want to. We've tried variations with green tomatoes, pears, bananas, kiwis (very nice), kale (not so nice), ginger, etc. Anything goes, as long as it suits your taste buds and it is so much fun to try out all kinds of combinations. Maybe for kids this would be a very cool idea to get them to eat/drink fruit and veg. The only downside to this experimentation is the cleaning. It does take a few minutes to clean your machine after its use and to get rid of all the fruit pulp.
Hang on a minute? Getting rid of the fruit pulp? It does seem like a bit of a waste when you're using all this top-quality produce and you're throwing out so much of it. Of course, if you have a compost bin, then at least throwing it onto the compost heap means that it will make for lovely and fast working compost. It really is great stuff. But still it seems like a shame, especially because fruit and veg pulp is actually quite handy to use in the kitchen. Depending on what you're using your juice for, you can make loads of stuff with your pulp. It is very good in pasta sauces and especially in curries to give it body and sweetness. It can also be used for cakes, muffins and brownies, as you do in carrot cake. And finally, the pulp can be used for a very quick and unusual vegetable stock for any soups you're making. Here's a variation on our Japanese Ramen Noodle Soup with a stock made with pulp from our juicer. It was incredibly tasty! And very funky looking too!
So whenever you're using your juicer, do try to make something with your fruit and veg pulp. Don't just throw it in the bin, at least put it into a compost bin, and if you want to have a bit of culinary fun then try experimenting with it.
I hope this wee blog post has shown you how great juicers are and how endless the possibilities are, even with the waste pulp. Sure they're not cheap but they are a great investment, for your happiness and your well-being.
This year I am starting a new independent project which looks at the food scene in Northern Ireland. I really believe that Northern Ireland is an incredibly underrated food destination. In my years of living here, eating out, shopping for food and actually meeting farmers and small-scale producers, I have really enjoyed local quality produce which is available at very affordable prices. And because I feel so passionate about local food and about the great deals on offer I want to share my experiences, where I eat, where I shop and what farmers and producers I meet as I travel around the country this year. It's a personal journey really, of me discovering Northern Ireland's food culture, which I hope you will follow.
I have already started out with some reviews of where to eat in Belfast. Belfast has a varied selection of high quality yet affordable restaurants, and here are a few of them. In future I will also be looking at certain shops, markets or schemes where you can get your food from, so stay tuned. And finally, I'm arranging with boxa box scheme in County Antrim to make a short programme on their scheme and some of the farmers that supply them. So thanks for reading and there will be more interesting stuff to come!
Sourdough Bread is bread made with homemade yeast, also called natural or wild yeast sometimes, and it's very unique in flavour. As the name suggests, it does have a slightly sour hint to it, but this really depends on what kind of starter you use and what flour you use to make your bread. As a rule of thumb, the more wholemeal is in your starter and in your bread, the more sour it will get and using mostly white flour doesn't really make it that sour. What sourdough also does which is unique really, is to give bread that mellow depth of flavour. It's quite hard to describe, but when you're eating sourdough it just tastes so natural you could say, or the way bread is supposed to taste.
Sourdough is really comforting and I think it's the perfect 'home bread' because of how non-fussy it is. This may sound strange because most people say it's complicated and it needs more time to make, but it's really such a forgiving bread. You can forget it for a few hours while it rises and just make it whenever it suits you, there's no time presure. And doing most of your work during the morning and evening means that even with a busy lifestyle you can afford to make homemade bread. The starter itself is also pretty flexible and forgiving. If it doesn't ferment that much anymore you can add more flour and water, maybe a bit of sugar or honey, put in a mixer or whisk by hand and after letting it rest for a while it should work as usual again. That's also why I consider my two videos to be a guide on sourdough making and not a recipe. Conditions for sourdough bread are always different and everybody has their own way of making it, which shouldn't discourage you at all, but encourage you to put your own personal twist on it. This bread is made to suit your needs!
Thanks for watching and we're sure your bread will be a success!!!
The title says alternative, but I should really call nasturtium capers a replacement to the otherwise boring capers you get in supermarkets. Nasturtium capers are the business and I just love them, and I don't understand why I've just discovered them now. For any of you who don't know what nasturtiums are, they are that ever-present creeping garden flower that some people might call a weed. Now it's true that its growing habit is very much weed-like, because if you start growing a few nasturtium plants somewhere in your garden, they'll come back year after year. While some people loathe this vigorous behaviour, some people are truly excited about the sheer promise that this yearly cycle entails. Every part of the nasturtium plant is edible, and it might not be very consistent food, but it's absolutely beautiful and so peppery.
At the start of the growing season, one of my all-time favourite things to do is to go to the community garden during a nice sunny day, bring a nice loaf of homemade bread, a nice dressing and a cool drink; all the other ingredients for our impromptu lunch I gather from the garden. Nice crunchy fresh lettuces, pungent pink chive flowers and beautiful red and yellow nasturtium flowers. Toss it in a bowl, put a light dressing over it and you've got summer and sunshine in a bowl. A gorgeous and so satisfying meal, and yet so simple. For that reason alone I would grow nasturtiums and because they attract beneficial insects to your plot and harmful insects away from your actual crops. But it gets better.
In late summer and early autumn the beautiful nasturtium flowers turn into wrinkly seed pods. They're bright to dark green and already look surprisingly like capers. And there's plenty of them! A few plants will probably produce hundreds of pods...ok maybe that's a bit exaggerated but that's what it feels like, and that's the reason why some people call nasturtiums a weed. If you don't pick all those pods, which you won't, then they will get into the ground somehow and sprout again next year. So yes, if you want to grow them in your garden be mindful of where you will put them.
Harvesting nasturtium pods is a real treat, they come off the plant very easily and remind me a bit of harvesting small berries. Once you've got a few handfuls take them into the kitchen and you can pickle them according to your taste. Now we chose the simplest way, cider vinegar and a bay leaf, put into a pickling jar along with the washed capers and then you just have to wait for a few weeks and they're ready. It's honestly the easiest thing you can pickle. But there are recipes where you add other spices, a bit of sugar and warm the whole mixture before adding it to the capers. You can experiment a bit with the variations which are good fun, but honestly the simple recipe makes for a great result as well.
The simple version is quite crunchy, has a really nice peppery taste to it and a great lingering aroma from the bay leaf. The acidity of the cider vinegar rounds it off nicely making it a perfect condiment. They are truly amazing I think, because they are so simple and cost nothing at all and I prefer their flavour and texture to the shop bought alternative, which is more expensive and almost more complicated to get. And because they are that bit different and more interesting they really transform your food or a simple dish. The other day I made tartar sauce with these capers and with homemade mayo, parsley from the garden and some nice lemon zest. Again simple, but so different that it makes for a food experience even just by spreading it on a slice of homemade sourdough bread, which in itself is an experience.
Nasturtium capers, homemade tartar sauce and sourdough bread are such simple things, yet when they're homemade with homegrown ingredients and then combined make for a delicious bite. These are the moments I love the most about food, when something simple inspires you and surprises you.
Why nobody in the UK or Ireland is selling Nasturtium capers baffles me, they're plentiful and can't be more expensive to produce than normal capers, and they're local and thus more sustainable. Maybe I found myself a business idea...
One man's trash is another man's treasure. In a way this popular saying kind of reminds me of leftovers. Most people seem to have a dubious and reluctant relationship towards them. Quite often whatever remains of your meal is simply discarded or just boringly reheated in the microwave to make a less tasty and drier version of the same meal. Even the word 'leftovers' doesn't sound too appetising. But then again leftovers are frequently used in restaurants in order to save costs and reduce waste and make delicious meals (don't worry, they're not actually using the leftovers from your plate). And there are also some people at home who make wonderful and diverse meals with the remains of their previous dinner. But why isn't that more common? Is it because the microwave has made using leftovers a no-brainer? Or is it because we have been taught all our lives that we don't have to finish our meals and then simply throw them away? Might it be the fact that less people are confident and creative cooks these days, and that the concept of necessity isn't really a stimulating impulse for cooking?
Who knows. I on the other hand love leftovers as a creative ingredient for making exceptional dishes, and instead of trying to figure out why people don't like leftovers I will try to convince you that you should love them! A good starting point for this I think is Christmas or the whole festive season when everybody buys lots of great food and a lot of that food becomes leftovers. Leftover turkey sandwich for example is a leftover meal that most people love, and that's because there are all these ingredients and toppings available to make a really nice sandwich. And maybe people will still make turkey soup, but that's as far as it will get most of the time. But there is so much more potential, especially with nice joints of meat. So lets have a look at our New Year's Day feast and how many meals that one shoulder of lamb provided for two greedy foodies and how sensationally amazing leftovers can be.
Day 1) Here's the original feast. A jerk-style slow roasted shoulder of lamb with spiced couscous, a gravy made with the roasting juices and some wine, and a selection of roasted pumpkin, sweet potato, celery, topped with dried figs and apricots. Yum! It was incredibly rich, and we didn't actually eat that much for lunch and then for supper we just cut off slices of cold lamb and picked at the veg and the couscous and basically had a bit of a food orgy.
Day 2) The following day I decided to pick the rest of the meat of the bone and I was really surprised to see how much meat was on it. I even left a bit for future use, because I knew I was going to use the bones as well. Anywho, I took the meat, the gravy and some leftover mulled wine and put everything in a pot on low heat. The rest of the celery I cut into strips and added them as well, the figs and apricots too and the pumpkin and sweet potato I squished into a mash and mixed it into the now thick, dark and rich stew. The pumpkin and sweet potato really added a lot of body and sweetness, and this is really something I would never do if I would make a stew from scratch, because I'm a bit lazy like everybody. But having all these amazing leftovers after such a feast means that you have an arsenal of unique ingredients to play with and make the most delicious dishes that are bursting with flavour and that would otherwise take loads of preparation and time to make. But because you're stretching that preparation over a couple of meals and days the workload becomes less and allows you to add flavour on flavour and make the tastiest of dishes!
Day 3) This one I am particularly proud of and it really deserves a few pictures. The next dish we made was a pie, and I truly think without making it sound like a cliché, that this was perhaps the best pie I've ever had! We used some leftover mash-potato and some spare cheese that was left in the fridge to make a pie base, quite unusual but such a good idea! There wasn't that much meat left in the stew because we had two servings of it the day before, and so we decided to fry some onions, peppers and mushrooms to add them into the mixture. Good meat pies need vegetables!
The savoury sweetness of the onions, the roast pepper flavour and that mushroomy goodness along with some leftover cream truly transported this dish to the next level. Flavour upon flavour, it was such an explosion of taste, even the memory of it still seems to linger on my tongue. And what else is missing to make this dish complete? Yes, some nice puff pastry, crunchy buttery goodness topped with some lovely (slightly tacky) love motives to give that old-fashioned pie sensation. And here it is, the best pie of all times, in our humble opinion.
So that's it folks, the magic of using leftovers in its full glory! A dish like this would have never happened from scratch in our house, even though we're keen cooks. And it's not only the time and prep that is of importance here, it's the unusual collection and composition of the ingredients which are truly unique in a sense. I will perhaps never again eat a pie this good! Or perhaps I'll make an even better one some day, but probably never again this exact same one. And that is special and makes a dish worth remembering. And this specialness in a way comes from necessity and the need I felt to make and eat my leftovers because I didn't want them to land in the bin. Need and necessity are a powerful drive and although they're not that common anymore when it comes to our modern ways of preparing and consuming food, I always feel a challenge when I have some amazing leftovers and that challenge inspires me to make the next dish that much better than the previous one. So I hope this story of leftovers will have made you think about the humble beginnings a masterpiece of a dish can have and how we all can create such masterpieces at home, that are unique and bursting with flavour and excitement!
Day 4) And what about those bones you might ask? I did mention them after all, and yes after all that feasting and decadence and food moments that changed our lives we wanted something light and simple again to clean our tastebuds. An Irish stew is the answer - no rich gravies, roasted veg, cream, puff pastry, nothing like that. Carrot, Onion, Spud, Celeriac, some water, salt and pepper and a few bones. Let it cook for a while, remove the bones, mash it a bit, and there's your dish. Clean flavours, simple tastes.
This was our last video of 2012, and it's perfect for celebrating! Glühwein or mulled wine is such an amazing drink when made from scratch, it really doesn't reflect most mulled wines you get in the UK. And I think the problem in the UK is that the recipes here are more like a fruit punch than a Glühwein. There's often way too much juice, not enough spice and sugar and certainly not enough alcohol to make it a heart-warming experience. And that is what Glühwein is all about. Glühen means to glow in German, and so Glühwein is glowing wine in the sense that it gives you that glowing or warming sensation. And that is what regular mulled wine in the UK lacks the most. Because the glow in mulled wine is not only created through the heat of the drink and the Christmas spices, it's that extra shot of hard alcohol, like whiskey, brandy, rum or schnaps (often in Germany) that makes the whole difference.
And what also makes our recipe of mulled wine different is that at times we like to use optional ingredients that we have, like star anis, bay leaf, cardamom, lemon zest as an addition to the holy trinity of Glühwein flavours, cinnamon, clove and orange. Also, for the orange and lemon, it is better to use a zester than to put entire lemon or orange peels into the wine, after some time it will make the whole mixture bitter. We always put our spices and zest into a reusable muslin bag so that the flavour goes into the wine, but you don't end up having to sieve the bits and pieces with your teeth, which is very often the case with homemade mulled wine. You can also pass the orange juice through a sieve to guarantee no bits in your wine.
And finally, if you can afford it, use a decent wine. It doesn't have to be amazing, but tastewise there is a real difference between using the cheapest of wines and decent wines, so £5-10 bottles. But really exceptional wines don't make a difference, so don't splurge unnecessarily. And do try making Glühwein with white wine and rosé as well, it makes for very pretty alternatives, but do be aware that orange juice will cloud the mixture, so you could decide to only add zest for white and rosé. And serve it in pretty glasses :)
Here we are with another installment of the Cool Kitchen. It's beautiful Brioche bread, homemade and thousand times better than the stuff you get in supermarkets. It's not that difficult to make, it's probably cheaper than buying one and it's just fluffiest bread ever. It's so light, it really tastes like eating clouds. And this heavenly experience is pretty straighforward to make, it's pretty much a basic bread recipe with a few added ingredients, some small alterations and a lot of time! Now good bread simply takes time, there's no way around it, but the time you have to actually do something is only 10-15 minutes. So you just have to find a way of making bread baking fit into your daily routine, which is pretty easy. Good luck with the recipe and thanks for watching!
